‘Yes, I am coming,’ said Lawford. He shut his mouth and held his breath, and stair by stair he descended, driving steadily before him the crouching, gloating menacing shape, darkly lifted up before him against the darkness, contending the way with him. ‘Are you ill? Are you hurt? Has anything happened, Lawford?’ came the anxious old voice again, striving in vain to be restrained. ‘No, no,’ muttered Lawford. ‘I am coming; coming slowly.’ He paused to breathe, his hands trembling, his hair lank with sweat, and still with eyes wide open he descended against the phantom lurking in the darkness—an adversary that, if he should but for one moment close his lids, he felt would master sanity and imagination with its evil. ‘So long as you don’t get in,’ he heard himself muttering, ‘so long as you don’t get _in_, my friend!’ ‘What’s that you’re saying?’ came up the muffled, querulous voice; ‘I can’t for the life of me hear, my boy.’ ‘Nothing, nothing,’ came softly the answer from the foot of the stairs. ‘I was only speaking to myself.’ Deliberately, with candle held rigidly on a level with his eyes, Lawford pushed forward a pace or two into the airless, empty drawing-room, and grasped the handle of the door. He gazed in awhile, a black oblique shadow flung across his face, his eyes fixed like an animal’s, then drew the door steadily towards him. And suddenly some power that had held him tense seemed to fail. He thrust out his head, and, his face quivering with fear and loathing, spat defiance as if in a passion of triumph into the gloom. Still muttering, he shut the door and turned the key. In another moment his light was gleaming out on the grey perturbed face and black narrow shoulders of his visitor. ‘You gave me quite a fright,’ said the old man almost angrily; ‘have you hurt your foot, or something?’ ‘It was very dark,’ said Lawford, ‘down the stairs.’ ‘What!’ said Mr Bethany still more angrily, blinking out of his unspectacled eyes; ‘has she cut off the gas, then?’ ‘You got the note?’ said Lawford, unmoved. ‘Yes, yes; I got the note.... Gone?’ ‘Oh, yes; all gone. It was my choice. I preferred it so.’ Mr Bethany sat down on one of the hard old wooden chairs that stood on either side of the lofty hall, and breathing rather thickly, rested his hands on his knees. ‘What’s happened?’ he inquired, looking up into the candle. ‘I forgot my glasses, old fool that I am, and can’t, my dear fellow, see you very plainly. But your voice—’ ‘I think,’ said Lawford, ‘I think it’s beginning to come back.’ ‘What, the whole thing! Oh no, my dear, dear man; be frank with me; not the whole thing?’ ‘Yes,’ said Lawford, ‘the whole thing—very, very gradually, imperceptibly. I think even Sheila noticed. But I rather feel it than see it; that is all.... I’m cornering him.’ ‘Him?’ Lawford jerked his candle as if towards some definite goal. ‘In time,’ he said. The two faces with the candle between them seemed as it were to gain light each from the other.